Almaz Gebregziabher and her granddaughter, Halley, hold a photograph of Halley’s mother, Birtukan Mideksa , who has been likened to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi in her fight for democracy. Photograph: Xan Rice

""My child did not do anything wrong – she had no weapon, she committed no crime," said Almaz Gebregziabher, Birtukan Mideksa 's mother, in her house on a hillside in Addis Ababa after visiting her daughter one recent Sunday. "I want the world to know that this is unjust." Many Ethiopians agree.

At noon every Sunday an old Toyota sedan donated by supporters of Ethiopia's most famous prisoner pulls up near a jail on the outskirts of the capital. A 74-year-old woman in a white shawl and her four-year-old granddaughter – the only outsiders the prisoner is allowed to see – step out for a 30-minute visit.

Most inmates at Kaliti prison want their relatives to buy them food. But Birtukan Mideksa , the 35-year-old leader of the country's main opposition party, always asks her mother and daughter to bring books: an anthology titled The Power of Non-Violence, Bertrand Russell's Best, and the memoirs of Gandhi, Barack Obama, and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese political prisoner to whom she has been compared.